The End of the World and the Last God

THE END OF THE WORLD AND THE LAST GOD

The

END OF THE WORLD AND THE LAST GOD

PIERRE-HENRI D’ARGENSON

TRANSLATED BY

JAMES CHRISTIE

FIRST HILL BOOKS

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by FIRST HILL BOOKS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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Copyright © Pierre-Henri d’Argenson 2021

First published in French as La fin du monde et le dernier dieu, un nouvel horizon pour l’humanité © Editions Liber, Montréal, 2018

Translated into English by Mr. James Christie (james.christie.cit@gmail.com)

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021946518

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-187-6 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-187-3 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

Many may still deem this idea as pure folly, but I remain convinced that the most important discovery to be made, one that may well be reached during this century, is the invention of flight. Through this, man will travel faster and more comfortably, even transporting goods aboard vast flying vessels. There will be armed air forces. Our current fortifications will be rendered obsolete […]. However, our artillerymen will of course learn to hit flying targets. Our kingdom will therefore need a new Secretary of State in charge of the air force.

Marquis d’Argenson, Mémoires (written between 1728 and 1757)¹

We’ve always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dared to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we’ve just forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we’ve barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us.

Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), Interstellar (2014, Christopher Nolan)

1 This quote can be found engraved up in French on Aviation Wall in Felicity, California, which charts the key landmarks of French aeronautics. The first manned flight took place in a hot air balloon made by the Montgolfier brothers in Paris on November 21, 1783. French military aviation arrived in 1909, and France’s Air Ministry was created in 1928.

Contents

Prologue

Part I The Very End of Our World

Chapter 1

The End of Geography and the Demise of the Human Body

Chapter 2

The Decline of Eros

Chapter 3

The Real End of History

Part II The Great Ennui

Chapter 4

The Greatest Depression

Chapter 5

Consumer Satiety

Chapter 6

The Wish for Deluge

Part III The Great Filter

Chapter 7

Overcoming Division

Chapter 8

Fighting Religious Angst

Chapter 9

Traveling through Space (Alive)

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

PROLOGUE

From our first steps through the African savannah 2 million years ago, right up until we started to make our way into the stratosphere, we humans never truly envisaged that our destiny could lie elsewhere than on Earth. The idea that we could one day be meant to leave the planet where we were born was just not conceivable by most people in the past. Their imagination was peopled by angels, demons or spirits, not by aliens and space battles. For them, the celestial heavens remained a magnificent backdrop thought up by God or competing divinities, and absolutely nothing in any antique cosmogony suggests that a possible departure from Earth could one day be humanity’s greatest adventure. Medieval man would have had a spiritual breakdown if he had been invited to step aboard a spaceship and take a voyage to colonize another star system.

Yet things have changed with space conquest. As we gradually discover the existence of exoplanets suited to our wildest dreams, the possibility of a departure from Earth sounds increasingly familiar and exciting. Indeed, as inaccessible as this may seem, at least for the decades to come, the likelihood of interstellar travel should no longer be viewed, given the amazing technological progress we are witnessing every single day, as an unrealistic dream. After years of relative indifference following the exploits of the Apollo missions, space exploration has obviously caught the public’s imagination once again, and we’re shyly beginning to admit that traveling to the most lavish and furthest-flung reaches of the universe could one day come true.

However, this enthusiasm may well hide a disturbing existential question, with potentially dramatic consequences: what if humankind is in fact bored with life on Earth?

If someone had presented me with that question during a conversation, I would have been slightly troubled, but this only on an intellectual level. But if this awareness of a boring world had come to me through the experience of everyday trials and tribulations, then I would have devoted my full attention to it. This, of course, is exactly what happened. A few years ago, I was depressed at work, but I could not distinguish between a simple bore-out or disillusionment concerning my professional life, which can affect anyone, and a more tenacious ennui, revealed in a disappointing everyday life but reaching to the very essence of my entire human existence. By slowly tracing the original source of that ennui, I discovered that the reason for it was not to be found in anything serious related to my life conditions and perspectives, but in a both unexpected and fateful event that is happening right now: the end of our world.

Upon hearing such words, one is more likely to think back to the death of humanity in one apocalyptic shower of fireballs, with yawning chasms appearing in the earth and skies rent asunder amidst a Dantesque inferno. But the end of the world I am talking about is already taking place, in a way that is rather less spectacular but just as real, which I will for the moment describe thus: man’s potential on Earth has been exhausted. The world has ended, for it has nothing new to offer us anymore. We have discovered every piece of land, tried all sorts of political regime, committed ourselves to all possible kinds of religious beliefs and possibly achieved all the forms of art. We have become old and weary. Indeed, this finite world seems no longer suited to our biology or to our psychology, which were designed by and for exploration. This exhaustion of terrestrial possibilities was always going to happen, for it is in our human nature not only to conquer our surrounding environment but also to stretch, knead and shape our situation to provide us with every possible future, for better or worse. It is humankind that brought on the end of the world, and unless early man had stayed hidden in his cave, this was the inevitable outcome.

Yet if we accept that the thirst for conquest and exploration is at the heart of human nature, we will have to lucidly confront the resulting question: can humanity survive the finitude of our world? Will we hold out long in this cloistered, explored, domesticated, mapped, charted, limited, monitored, ransacked and stripped world—this Earth that has become so transparent and devoid of all mystery?

Up until now, the haunting prospect of a finite world had been nothing more than just another concept. Little by little, I began to realize that this moment is indeed upon us, despite all efforts made to ignore or deny it, resulting in an unvoiced fear and the following nagging doubt: if everything has been tested and explored, what on earth are we going to do now? Upon which goal will we focus our thirst for conquest, our need for the novel, our desire to learn and experiment? Will we head off to conquer space? And if we can’t, will we recreate the clean slate we so yearn for by destroying our world and start over anew, as after the Great Flood? Or will we die of boredom, when Earth will have become like a tiger’s cage, the biggest open-air zoo in the universe? Knowing that the world can offer us no more is not merely a piece of information; it is a shattering reality to which our bodies and minds will react wildly and, in my view, the biggest challenge humanity will have to face in the near future.

Part of the solution may lie above us, but leaving Earth is easier said than done. The day when our technology can catapult us in one piece to a planet orbiting another star is considerably far off. Just getting to Mars is already a colossal endeavor. Space is not a friendly environment for humans, nor, apparently, for any living being. In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi came up with a now-famous paradox, which can be summarized as follows: given that the majority of the universe is much older than Earth, extraterrestrial civilizations, if they exist or have existed, should either have visited us by now or have left some visible trace in space. Why then have we not spotted any little green men through our telescopes? Where are the Others? According to American economist Robin Hanson, one of the most recent thinkers to study this question seriously, this can mean only one of two things: either we truly are the only evolved life form in the universe, or assuming that they, too, have evolved from a microbial form to a fully developed life form, all other extraterrestrial civilizations have encountered some mysterious obstacle to interstellar expansion, known as the Great Filter.² The question Hanson asks for planet Earth is whether this obstacle lies in our past or in our future. If it lies in our past, we have already overcome this obstacle, and it may well be our destiny to colonize the galaxy. If the barrier lies ahead of us, then it would limit our chances of leaving our own star system, for there is no known proof across the universe that anyone so far has been able to do so.

One could evade this issue simply by saying that we still have plenty of time to develop the technology required for our Great Exodus. However, if we wish to survive as a species, I fear that we don’t have much time. Earth’s history has taught us that huge cataclysmic exterminations occur with a certain recurrence, resulting in the extinction of species on a massive scale. Earth has experienced five of these in the past. The sixth, brought on by man, is apparently already underway.³ According to professor Stephen Nelson, a meteorite with a diameter of 1 km strikes Earth once every million years on average, and a meteorite with a 10 km diameter once every 100 million years, causing a catastrophe with the potential to wipe out life on Earth.⁴ So, it is statistically likely that humankind will have to face mortal dangers well before being charred to a crisp by solar inflation. Aware of the risks of Armageddon, Europe and the United States have launched missions to identify large asteroids known as near-Earth objects, which could potentially collide with Earth.

One could also consider that it matters little whether in the end we are capable of colonizing space or not, as long as we have our humdrum lives to attend to here on Earth until our planet dies a quiet natural death. But I believe our human nature will not let this happen. We are wanderers, explorers, pioneers, in